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Thursday, May 31, 2012

I pretended to be a tourist on the 17th of May. I was after
all in Oslo which isn’t really home and just visiting for the
celebrations. I had my camera in my pocket at all times which isn’t really
where it should be as in my hand makes more sense for pictures of the going
ons.

I’ve celebrated national holidays before. Kenyan national
holidays, and we have many. The first few months of the year are rather dry.
January is broke month. February we begin to go out again but no holidays, no
long weekends just normal Kenyan life. March moves on. April has only that day
for fools and on May 1st we have our first stay at home holiday.
June 1st has the day of internal self-governance which I remember
meaning we took care of everything except defence and diplomacy. 10th
of October used to be Moi day. This is the day when we got our second
president. 20th October we celebrate the incarceration of our first
president as Kenyatta day. October is probably the most loved month when you
are in school, a short 10 week school
term with interruptions for both of these days as well as an agricultural show
fitting snugly somewhere in the month. 12th December comes and we
celebrate two things actual independence and the day we became a republic.

So we have 4 national days. The president will give a
speech. Some people will go watch. Most people will stay at home because in
truth even with four we don’t really have a national day. It’s strange but I
never even used that expression before it didn’t mean much to me, we just call
them holidays. That’s what they are, I can look back over my life and see them
all follow the same pattern, sleep in, chill around the house and recently have
a family lunch even more recently make sure that the family lunch is
accompanied by alcohol and all manner of loud aunts, uncles, cousins and
friends. We don’t really have national days in Kenya just holidays and the
excuses to take them. Sometimes the president would declare a holiday
pretty randomly. Well I guess there was always a reason behind it but it always
felt like he woke up that morning and didn’t think he would want to wake up the
next and didn’t want to appear lazy so he made all of us lazy.

In Norway 17th of May is a big deal. It’s huge. I
walked into the laundry and as I was waiting for my clothes to dry I asked this
lady whether it would be good since I was a “tourist.”

“17th of May is the only day Norwegian people
live.”

That’s something else I realise living here. Maybe it’s the
same everywhere in the world but I have never lived in a country with a lot of
immigrants, here people stick to their original nationality no matter what it
was. They may have been born in Norway or spent all their formative years here
but they feel more defined by what came before in their blood, their earlier
genetic memory always peeks through the curtain that experience draws over all
that and reminds them to call their countrymen Norwegians. Perhaps it’s just
their inner chameleon showing its skin, or trying not to actively mirroring my
obvious foreignness and trying to make me more at ease. “You can bitch about
Norwegians to me because am not really from here I just lived here for the last
… years and though I haven’t been home for just as many years am as foreign here as
you.”

But on the 17th of May everyone feels Norwegian.
We got up early to make our way to a friend’s place and had to pass by the subway
station. At 9 in the morning the city was already full of life and noise. You
see Norway is a very quiet country. For months and months I couldn’t even put
my finger on what was missing then I was told that drivers can only hoot their
cars when they are in the midst of an emergency otherwise they get fined by the
police. The streets are quiet. The
cars move silently and the loudest thing you hear is the patter of feet.
You get on the bus, train or tram and it’s even more silent. People burying
their headphones in their ears, burrowed so deep that nothing escapes, not a
squeak, not a head bob not a beat. On the 17th of May there was conversation
in the bus, there was laughter in the air, there were little children singing
in the subway. And there was hooting… well no there wasn’t and thank god for
that, it’s not a sound you can find yourself missing.

We were having breakfast at a friend’s place and as soon as
we entered a glass of champagne was put in my hands. I had just arrived from
Poland so I had some vodka for the day’s festivities but it was not 10 am yet
so I left it snug in my bag. We fit ourselves in this beautiful apartment and began
talking the day away. It’s at times like this that you realise the common
humanity of nearly everyone. The togetherness in celebration we experienced the
laughter and the joy and mostly… well am trying to find a way to write this
without appearing to be sexist. A disclaimer will do. Women are equal to men
and should be given the same opportunities as men everywhere, your gender
shouldn’t define your options just your personality, hard work, luck and
tenacity are the things that determine your destiny. That said whenever there’s a party in Kenya a natural form of
segregation takes place and in not time at all the men disappear from the
kitchen. They go sit down in the lounge and entertain each other with stories
stored up from last time. The women for some reason entertain each other as
they cook. Well on 17th of May (at least where I was) it happened here too.

Everything is tuned into these celebrations. Stores are shut
down and the television pays an endless homage to the day. Reports fly in from
everywhere around Norway. Televised celebrations from Kristiansand and
Kristiansund, Halden and Horten, Arendal, Alesund, Oslo and many many others
with letters like æ, å andø marring their pronunciation. Chefs are interviewed about what they are cooking and families show off their traditional dress. The
ties that had been hidden all year round are dusted off and noosed up. Ironed
shirts, aired dresses, cuff linked sleeves, pretty necklaces all vie for
attention on the TV screen. If you aren’t at one of these parades you should
be.

10 am reached and the vodka was reached for. And it looks like water so we can walk around the streets with it
right and if you see the police coming shout out “gratulerer midag.” We tried
to get to the castle to watch the king and queen wave but it began raining and the
streets were so crowded there was nothing to be done. In the end some friends
and I went to this small café near Anker and had some beers. The sun had come
up again and was teasing our skin with its kisses. This was one of my last days
in Oslo I knew and I had gotten to know the people surrounding me. They were my
friends, my brothers, my family. We passed off emotion with jokes, jokes about
the early days when the end of the fk experience was not as pressing concern as
what to do when your body is permanently in a deep freezer. But as happens with
drink it soon passed to emotion, true emotion. Promises of forever and the
blinking away of almost tears. Good days come along so rarely and when they do it’s
hard to imagine that you ever needed anything more than a few friends and the
sun on your skin.

I missed all the parades because am a horrible tourist but I
saw the police mounted on horses and I desperately wanted a picture. My camera
was far away my reflexes were fogged, but I could get them to stop.

“Hey, hey could you stop for a picture.”

Nothing.

“Ok just look my way as the camera flashes.”

Nothing

“Ok all I want you to do is act like you can’t hear me.”

They did.

At night I had a goodbye to say. Our project manager has
moved away from Norway, on to different challenges, responsibilities and an
adventure that will probably change her life forever. She lives, or used to
live in Oslo and I knew that the next time I was there she would be gone. We went to a bar nearby and sat down in a large group of
people talking and laughing and drinking. But it was that scene at the end of Oceans 11. They have successfully ripped off the bank and they are standing at
a bridge watching the sun give way to the Vegas night. All you can see are silhouettes
of the characters and between them there is the comfort of silence. The bond
prepared by scaling a mountain together. The fear that goodbye could mean
forever. The certainty that forever couldn't wipe away right now. This holds for a few minutes and then one of them tears away. Maybe he
chucks a cigarrete into the sea maybe he doesn’t. Then he leaves and the spell
begins to break. They begin to go and peel away from each other one by one till
all that was left was the bridge, the beautiful memory. That’s what it felt
like. One of us had left and it was a herald of the end. Saying goodbye to her
was beginning to say goodbye to everyone else too and that goodbye reminded me what it was I don’t like about travelling, what it was I don’t like about
meeting new people from all over the world, what it was I don’t like about
hallos and beginnings. It reminded me that all that is just a mirror of what
happens at the end. The end of the journey, a goodbye to people from so far
away another meeting is a smile of the gods. Goodbyes and endings.

The whole of Norway was celebrating and we were too. We all
had each other and the moment and the lesson from my childhood that in the end
they are all family days.

Monday, May 28, 2012

I have learned some things about early trains, planes and
buses; don’t go to sleep before you have showered, shaved and dressed. Don’t go
to sleep before you have shat, packed and checked your travel documents, don't go to sleep until you are ready, set and in position.

I had an early morning train to Warsaw, Monday at 9
and I had to go there only to leave on the late night train back to Gdansk to
catch my mid-morning flight back to Oslo. And there was no way in the world I
was missing that train. I’ll sleep on the train I told myself as I tried to get
directions from a polish populace that don’t all speak English, I’ll sleep on
the train I said as I went around and around the station trying to find my way
to Warsaw, I’ll sleep on the train I said as finally with ticket at hand I had to wait for an hour
on the platform before it was time to leave. While waiting I sank my eyes into
another book by a highly recommended polish author, this time the Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad. I had watched the movie based on this book and
absolutely loved it. Apocalypse Now directed by Francis Ford Copolla, starring Martin Sheen, Marlon Brando and Robert Duvall. A story about a man whose soul
was claimed by the jungle, a man who lost it all to the
shadows and the divine darkness inside them, lost his way, lost his purpose and
found a new one in service to the strange gods who live in places we can’t find
unless we can't find ourselves.

Then I got on the train and slept. Oh polish trains, so
comfortable, I stretched myself out panther like, well like a foetal panther
but in comparison to most of the trains I had been riding I was sleeping in the living room of luxury, the lap of
laziness. The toilets may have been my favourite, clean, sparse with the requisite
no smoking signs on the windows and a stream of ice-cold water whenever I
pressed the button, water gushing out in a stream so long and delicious my thirst was quenched and my bladder filled before another few hours passed. And
I slept and got up and slept again and got up again .

And I remembered being at this AIESEC conference last year
where I met the most charismatic man I have ever seen in action. At 50 years
old he had this group of 20 somethings mum listening to his every word as he
held forth on the ingredients of the
normal aiesec relationship, in the middle of a night party. First it has to be this really great person. A person
with all the ideals you grew up for, who wants to change the world or maybe
just be happy in it. Someone who has had all these experiences that make them
so different from whoever else is around, yet familiar to whoever you held
in your head as the person you thought about. Then it has to be geographically
impossible. A continent’s distance isn’t enough? What? Stick an ocean in there
and then it begins to count.

And so here I was taking a 6 hour train to take a 6 hour
train back just for the pleasure of 3 hours of company, and not even in a
relationship just something I felt was too deep a connection not to make the 12
hour trip to see, not to make the journey to Europe to be able to, not to keep
going back in Poland even when I had gotten jailed there once.

Sometimes, and am sure everyone has this, I’ll meet a girl
and it will be perfect. "I’ll say one thing and she’ll say anther and next thing
I know I’ll want to spend the rest of my life in the middle of that
conversation"*. Those times are fewer and further between. Maybe youth has a
better way of letting connections happen. Maybe we get more guarded with age.
More jaded with experience, more cynical with the cycles of hope and
heartbreak, wonder and wounds. But you
always have that conversation. This piece of lyric from Good Charlotte stuck with
me whenever I met my old primary school friends

“Some say that time changes/ best friends can become
strangers

And I don’t want that/ no not for us.”

I always found it so haunting. This story of love lost, more
like friendship deformed and reformed into something alien and the sounds that
come out of your mouth are strangled, the speech that you try to build is
swallowed in silences that feel so long, silences filled with
memories of the time when all that existed was laughter.

And those are for some reason the stories its easy to write about. It’s
easier to move with sorrow than with joy. Making people laugh may be the
greatest gift given to man since it’s so hard to achieve. Comics and people who
write feel good stories will always get my respect. It’s
so hard to keep them memorable and it’s so hard to think that something you are
doing has the shelf life of the last laugh it evoked. How to sustain joy in words is something i still want to learn.

But this meeting was perfect. She took me around the city and showed me this statue,
“that’s one of our famous poets, when everyone went to war he stayed back and
wrote a few poems instead.”

“Yer but what would one more soldier with one more gun have
done for the war.”

“I agree what we really needed then was one more poet
writing one more poem.”

I got to eat this

That is a house of bread. Inside there is meat, cabbage and
am not sure what else. The entire dish is edible and oh, so filling.

“We polish people we say your food is
your heart and you always welcome guests with your heart wide open so eat, eat. And do
you want something to drink?”

All too soon it was time to go back home. We said goodbye at
the train station and I hang around a little waiting for my train that turned
up an hour late this time. And apparently I had come over on first class, now I
got a second class ticket and really all I said about polish trains I take it
back. The doors open and you rush into these tiny compartments. You and 6 or 7
others. The first thing you do is draw the curtain and hope noone knocks. The windows don't open, the space isn't enough and if you leave yourself exposed people will just pile on. You sit
with your hands between your laps cursing the fact that you don’t have any
vodka and then when you need to go to the toilet you rouse everyone around you.

Here the toilets are more Kenyan you can see the tracks right through
the floor and they rush hypnotically past, passing, passing, passing. Then you
let go and look at these no smoking signs lying right next to the smouldering
ashes of the last cigarette that was put out there. You sleep like a statue.
Your face in front and make sure you don’t nod into the shoulders of the guy
next to you. Then you get home or what passes for home on these short trips,
the tiny hostel you are living in. Just enough time to pick up a bag and leave again.

*paraphrased from Hank Moody's letter to Karen in season 2 of carlifornication.

Wednesday, May 23, 2012

Then I landed in Poland again. I think I really do love this
country, also the flights are cheap from Norway. This time I didn’t know anyone in the
town I was going too(Gdansk), it was an adventure I had promised myself at least once
on this euro trip, go somewhere where no one knows you and see what happens. My housemate and I had decided to go there for a 5 day holiday.

We landed and it felt like home. The sun was behind some
clouds in the distance but for the first time in a long time this didn’t mean
that we were back to freezing. At the airport some guy who was going to Russia
came up to ask us how to get the train there and I looked around at all the
white faces and asked him “we’re the ones you chose to ask?”

We had done some groundwork and knew the name and street
address of a really cheap hostel we would be living in and all we needed was
directions. We came to a university lawn and there were these girls sitting there
having a beer picnic at 3 in the afternoon and we asked for directions.

“Well we don’t know where the place is but why don’t you
guys go get some beers and come join us."

I immediately I remembered why I like
Poland so much. So off on a beer run, a few zloty later and we were back but
they were nowhere to be seen, the promise of the day already being clouded
over, so we went to another group of girls, this time they were going our way
but they said they had to finish their beer first and asked us to sit down and keep
them company as they did this.

Apparently polish universities in Gdansk have this long
running tradition where the different faculties have week-long parties to
prepare the students for exams and we had landed smack in the middle of one of
these parties. So we sat and drank our beers and tried to remember their names.
Then they took us off to our hostel, all the time singing all the polish songs i know, one called kokoko that's the official Euro 2012 song. It is a joke song about the sound a chicken makes in Poland and i love how much they hate it. We bought some more beer on
the way and we promised to look them up once we were checked in.

The hostel we were living in was a university hostel. A
typical uni ofNairobi hostel, there were beds for each of us in a floor filled with a
host of college people who had finished their tasks for the week or who just
didn’t care enough to finish since the weekend was here and parties were all
around. The dorms were all located quite close to each other and so there were
gaggles of beer drinkers everywhere. Checking in we were informed that there
was a guy from Mozambique who lived in the same dorm and I felt he would be happy
to see someone from the home continent but the chances of us meeting him were
nearly nil.

“Brothers!”

We had someone shout and turned to see him
bearing down on us with a grin that would last for days. Hugo from Mozambique
whose mother was polish and father Congolese. He would turn out to be our best
friend for the time we were there making sure we went to all the party spots
warning us about all the dangers that surrounded us and showing us how to get
around. The first night was great; we went back to the party grounds at the
university and sat down next to the first people we had met. There are a lot of
Spanish people in Gdansk, students over there on an Erasmus exchange; it’s a
European student exchange which provides thousands of students with the best
years of their lives. You apply, you get accepted and dispatched to a foreign
country, they provide your upkeep for that year and you get so few classes and
so little exams that all it is an exercise in self-examination and how much
partying a young body can really do, well at least in Gdansk.

The day dragged into the night, reluctant to leave and not
really gone until 10 pm. The grounds were filled with students; everywhere you
turn opportunities for opportunities. Spanish, Polish and English mingling in
the night sky with beer burps and vodka yells. There was a wall in the
university where those strong of hand and heavy with alcohol would take turns
throwing beer bottles. I don’t know what the beer bottles were made of
since they would never break on first impact, put your shoulder, your legs and
your run into it and still they would just glance off the wall. Sometimes they
would get sent back to the thrower as hard as before and only then would they
crack showering the ground with wall cries of this-is-how-you-do-it. Once in a
while a beer bottle would get stuck on the wall a signature, an autograph and
for this cheers would resound.

look close enough and you see my signage

I had forgotten how easy it is to meet people when you are a
foreigner, all you have to do is smile and say hello and sometimes, a lot of
the time you get offered a seat and a conversation. You get to exchange curse
words and compliments in tongues so removed you wonder if they are lying to
you.

Next to our hostel, right beneath it there was a club, this
is where we finished off the first night. The next night we got invited to a
room party, by virtue of being strangers. Then off to Sopot. There are 3 cities
in such close vicinity to each other people will take the train from one to the
other just to party. Sopot, Gdansk and Gdynia. Before the weekend was over I
would make sure to see all of them.

Saturday night we went to yet another room party, sitting
with some Erasmus people and talking about life in different cities. This guy
from Sardinia gave us alcohol his father had made, he repeatedly cautioned us
not to drink too much just taste it, just wet your lips since it’s very strong.
Then we made our way over to sopot, the club scene and it really was. It’s been
a long time since I was in a club like that. The press of bodies, the sound of
music, the heat of expectation and the funny polish smoking zones which are
just a room inside one of the clubs. It’s not really for health reasons or
anything since the smoke leaks out onto the floor. Maybe its so the club doesn’t
get set on fire or just to provide a lounge area where you can go for a talk if
you can hear each other past the haze of smoke drifting lazily and pluming out
onto the floor.

Our meals were kebabs. Huge, huge kebabs. We would wake up
in the afternoon and make our way over to the shop and order one large. Take it
in your arms and begin to much away at the salad, meat, mayonnaise, bread and
ketchup. Halfway through your stomach would begin to groan under the heavy load
you were shovelling in. Go on and soon it would complain but when you knew that
it was the last meal you would have that day all you did was eat.

it looks much better.

On my last night another friend of ours took us to a lookout
point. We climbed and climbed this mountain and got to the top of the city. The
whole place was arrayed in front of us in all its colours and hues. The lights
playing off the night, the sun hinting that it didn’t like to be away, the
stars twinkling and shining and turning over and over and over. The height
brought the air in gulps of scenery and we just stood there and watched it take
us away.

For 4 days I was in university again. Doing all the things a
student should do. Talking the night away, dancing the night away, drinking the
night away with all pretensions to anything dropped off since everyone around us
wore no armour at all. Those four days probably will stand for very long as my
favourite university experience.

Monday, May 21, 2012

I was having a beer with a friend of mine on the streets of Oslo, it was raining that day, I can’t say how much I hate European rain, it’s too cold, it’s too
windy and the temperature gets under your skin. We were sitting outside this bar with an umbrella covering that kept away the water but not the wind or the spray or the life in the rain.

A woman passed by or tried to, she was shaking and
freezing, she didn’t seem to feel the wet slicking off the sky onto the
streets, onto her body, into her clothes. And she walked slowly, so very slowly. She had a cigarette in her mouth and she looked for a lighter, she put
her hands into her wet clothes and searched, a slow search since her strength
seemed to have failed her. For every step forward she had to take a couple
back, baby steps, little, tiny steps of pain and exhaustion. We stopped talking
and just watched. It didn’t feel like we were making a spectacle of her grief
just giving the moment the silence it deserved, the solemnity it required.

My friend asked her if she wanted a lighter and she nodded.

It looked like all she could do. Nod.

Then she lit her cigarette and sat down beside us. She looked
in her forties or fifties, she was one of those people who seemed beaten by
life, her age wasn’t written in her skin but in the way she stood and the way
she walked. Even with the freshness of a 17 year old she would still have looked
fifty. She had a purple patch on her left eye and a jacket that had seen better
days. She didn’t look like she herself had seen any for a long time

She smoked but could derive no pleasure from it. It was a
routine. An addict’s conviction that one smoke can make things feel better, but
it doesn’t always. Sometimes all it is a routine, a matter of custom, something
you have always done. Looking in the mirror and saying everything will be ok
but without the conviction necessary to convince yourself of this fact.

She trembled then she began to speak to my friend. She spoke
in Norwegian so I couldn’t understand but pain needs no translation, her voice
was shaking, trembling, breaking under the strain of a million souls on a million marches and she needed to talk.

Once in a while she would be overcome with what she was saying
she would shake even more violently and begin to sob then stop herself. Am not
really sure she could stop herself maybe she was just too tired with the effort it required. Maybe for this act she could see that unlike the cigarette a matter of
routine, a set custom wouldn’t help anything. Tears don’t always unlock the
pain we have and sorrow is not a liquid that we can squeeze out with eyes shut
so we don’t have to see where it goes. Maybe she just thought the world was
crying enough for her that day.

I had been happy for some time by that day. Filled with the conviction
that there are times when your lot in life is to spread joy, to smile and bring
happiness to places that don’t have enough. But a smile then would have been
horrible. Empathy and compassion were needed. I couldn’t understand the
specifics of what she said but I could understand what she said. Sorrow does
not need a translation.

She needed to talk then and maybe she did have a lighter
within easy reach but knew that the only way to talk to strangers in Norway is
to be offered a light. The rain kept pattering. It kept falling down the
streets, it kept up its cold as she told her story.

She would sigh.

Then she would continue. I looked at her and studied her
face. The purple bruise over her eye, the coat she was wearing, the way she
talked and I asked myself why life does this to people. Why it brings things to
this desperate edge where the edge in a voice is all that’s needed to convey
the deepest anguish.

I thought of a poem I had recently read, The Prophet by Khalil Ghabrain where he writes:

Your joy is your sorrow unmasked.

And the selfsame well from which your laughter rises was oftentimes filled with your tears.

And how else can it be?

The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain.

Is not the cup that holds your wine the very cup that was burned in the potter's oven?

And what if my purpose in life then was to take in her
sorrow. To give solace when it is needed. Not to bring joy but to mitigate
pain. To make it feel felt, to feel it too and let her know that she was not
alone. What if the turning down of my candle of joy, making it ten shades
darker so that a vacuum of loneliness could be one iota more bearable was the
true thing I was supposed to do? Some people do this all their lives. They put
themselves on the back burner, they can be happy but choose not to in order to
take away some of the world’s pain. Choosing a life they know will take them to
dark places and leave them grey, blue and bruised. Not full anymore, not as happy
as they could be. That’s true sacrifice and being confronted with it am not
sure I could make it.

She jingled some coins in her hand and began counting them
out. 20 kroner, 40 kroner, 60 kroner, shaking them into her hands, trembling them onto her fingers. She offered them to me and said something. My friend said
that I could only speak English. So she asked if she could buy my beer. I offered
her the rest of mine. As soon as I did I questioned myself. One more good
intention, more firm planting on the road to hell. I wanted to be kind but is
it right to give someone so sad, so obviously in need of something, anything
else, more alcohol. She finished off the gulp remaining. And offered back a
cigarette. I said no.

We sat a little longer in silence then she got up to go. I looked
after her as she left and saw that beneath the jacket she had on a dinner
dress. A black affair that you could wear to any state dinner in the world, she
had heels on too. Take off the jacket, cover up the bruise and she would be
instantly transformed. Take away the tremor cover up the pain and we would never
know what was going on.

Wednesday, May 16, 2012

For a couple of months I have been absorbed in a book, the great war for civilisation by Robert
Fisk. It’s a book about war and the failure of the human spirit. It is vivid and
fleshy, filled with details that make your skin crawl and remind you that what it contains is real. It’s a book about the Middle East and the wars fought there.
Wars for the greatest of all resources or in the service of them, religion,
holy lands, oil and more. There is a passage in the book that brings to life
what war is really about.

Florence Nightingale never reached this part of the old Ottoman
empire but her equivalent is Dr. Khaldoun al-Baeri, the director and chief
surgeon, a gently spoken man who has slept an hour a day for six days and who
is trying to save the lives of more than a hundred souls a day with one
generator and half of his operating theatres out of use-you cannot carry
patients in your arms to the sixteenth floor when they are coughing blood. Dr.
al-Baeri speaks like a sleepwalker, trying to describe how difficult it is to
stop a wounded man or woman from suffocating when they have been injured in the
thorax, explaining that after four operations to extract metal from the brains
of his patients he is too tired to think let alone in English.

As I leave him he tells me that he does not know where his family
is. "Our house was hit and my neighbours sent me a message to tell me they
sent them away somewhere. I do not know where. I have two little girls, they
are twins and I told them that they must be brave because their father has to
work night and day in the hospital and they mustn't cry because now I have to
work for humanity. And now I have no idea where they are." then Dr.
al-Baeri choked on his words and began to cry and could not say goodbye.

War is not pretty. It’s
not the coming together of the brave and the true, it’s not about victory,
honour and dignity is the hypothesis of the book. War is about suffering and
death and horror. Over and over he repeats that war represents the total failure of the
human spirit and turning page after page of the book it’s impossible to doubt
this. The above passage comes from the invasion of Iraq by American and British
forces in response to weapons of mass destruction which when proven a myth
became a crusade against a tyrant. It became about liberation of the Iraqi
people and the importing of concept of democracy into the land of Babylon,
Persia and the Iraqis. No one wants to
be occupied, self-determination is actually recorded in a UN charter somewhere
that my law knowledge can no longer access. The ability to control your own
destiny and decide for yourself is ultimately what makes adulthood so much better
than childhood. He quotes one of the Iraqis as saying that he would not fight
the Americans till Saddam was deposed because he didn’t want Saddam back but
once he was caught it would be bombs on. Another man says he would strap his one year
old daughter in a bomb and send her off to kill troops.

The book then does
amazing things, it asks why? Why did they strike against everyone and it delves
into historical analysis of the region of a type that I have never seen before.
He doesn’t flinch away from laying blame and laying it all around. He shows
step by step the harassment of the Muslim people in our lifetimes and the
lifetimes of our fathers. Endless was of oppression, the foisting of
dictatorships that served the interest of other countries, the endless
bloodshed that war by remote brings about.

Planes take you away
from the actual pain of killing. It could be a video game when you are so far
up and you spray fire on what could be ants. You don’t see the life being
extinguished, you don’t see the children. It’s always the children who suffer
the most. Sanctions imposed after the first time Iraq and America were at war
resulted in the death of about 500,000 children he says when you do the math that's 166 times the number of people who died in 9/11 . This is a huge figure;
this is a figure that makes sense only when you speak in such terms. When you
don’t really know that it’s one child who died after another and another and
another and another till the anothers would fill more words than I could write.
But in this book you don’t forget that. You never do, he was a reporter and he
dutifully notes names and ages of the dead. You read of 3 year old girls with
brains leaking out of their ears and missing limbs. Bombs placed by both sides
and the sides become so entangled that it’s really all sides doing this.

Death follows death.
And then more die and then the lens of the book goes back and looks at the
partition of the middle east, the death of the ottoman empire the slicing of
Lebanon from Syria, the creation of Jordan, and that question that may confound all
of us for years to come the creation of the state of Israel and what it mean for
the state of Palestine.

It seems everything
revolves around this or tries to. The integrity of Israel and the protection of
Palestine are used over and over to justify, to unite, to enmify people from
everywhere. Here too a historical analysis is given. He looks at the sides and
he condemns acts everywhere. He condemns the suicide bombers of Palestine but
asks the question why. Why did Israeli soldiers answer stones with bullets and
slingshots with real shots? How can a people react when their home they are
kicked out of and the given into a refugee camp?

Every chapter begins
with a poem or a quote. In one he quotes Tolstoy on war a passage that I always
remember:

War began, that is, an event took place opposed to
human reason and to human nature. Millions of men perpetrated against one
another such innumerable crimes, frauds, treacheries, thefts, incendiarisms,
and murders, as in whole centuries are not recorded in the annals of all the
law courts of the world, but which those who committed them did not at the time
regard as being crimes

Lest we forget that’s what war is. It is the
forgetting of decency. Its object is murder. Murder and theft. Kill the
soldiers and take their land. It results in looting and rape. It is accompanied
by fire and blood, by screams of anguish and whispers of loss. And the Middle
East seems embroiled in wars that have no end in sight.

He chronicles the 8 year war between Iran and Iraq.
8 years is a long time to be at war. 8 years ago it was 2004. I was a high
school student. My biggest concern was passing exams.my stress was at a minimum,
I had never even made a CV all I did was live. So much has happened in those 8
years in all our lives. To live them in subservience to war, death and
suffering is unimaginable for me. And when these two nations went at it they went at it. There was no
pause in the war, no quarter, they tore each other apart in a war
whose stories could give the devil nightmares.

He looks at Afghanistan, forever occupied by
empires on their decline. Alexander the Great tried for it. The British were
driven out, the Russian were driven out and the American came barging in. I
can’t remember the exact quote right now but it was he quoted something about about them coming over the
hill of destiny and meeting those who had gone before and that we learn nothing
from history except that we learn nothing from history.

And the history recounted tells us this over and
over. We see so many parallels between the ways empires have carved out
portions of the Middle East for themselves. It’s the rewind button of fate, the
way the world reminds itself of what’s happened. A failing of human beings is
our amnesia. We forget in lifetimes their lessons and generations never keep
within them the history the tattooed stories of loss and destruction that war
brings.

He brings us to Algeria and the sadness of the wars
fought there. The French leaving and the government that took over from them
leaving. The parallels again are astounding. We are doomed to repeat its mistakes
and we do.

Then there’s a list of names. There’s a visit to a
hospital and you see the horror of war laid out in front for all to see.
And its face is that of a five year old girl or a 12 year old boy. Its voice is
that of a mother weeping for her children. A father pretending pride and
suffering sorrow as he hears of a son who died.

The writing is so vivid I would fall between two
worlds. In no time at all I would get a visa to another place and look out of a
balcony in Lebanon, confront arms manufactures with the stories and evidence of
their trade. I would meet Osama bin laden and hear his justifications for what
he did. Look at foreign policy through Fisk's eyes and have mine cloud over by the short-sightedness and blindness of some of the decisions therein

I have never understood the middle east better than I
do now. I have never been such an authority on why things are the way they are.
But then remember the old maxim, the more you know the more you know that you
don’t know. 1,300 pages is a ghost, it’s a skeleton. Their production required
a body of work and sacrifice and he did. The life of covering the Middle East
is not easy. He shuttled from war to war surrounded by corpses and limb and
the ghosts of the gone, the misery of the survivors and the pain of the nations. But all i did was read and though i know more now than i did before, "i know nothing"

And then there were more names. The details, the
lives and in some cases the letters they wrote each other. These things happened they were horrible
and they ruined the world. and if we are not careful they will happen again.

Friday, May 11, 2012

I love reading about Mark Zuckerberg. The founder of Facebook,
I am CEO bitch his cards used to say . No matter what people say about
him he changed the world completely. I still remember the
first article I ever read about him, a lengthy profile in the New Yorker. How I
found it goes back to one of my older loves, the West Wing. That was a television show, that was a great
television show. The dialogue in the writing, the beauty in the words the power
in the drama and the comedy in the slip-ups all combined to produce magic every week. The first episode I ever watched
was on a Sunday evening, sitting at home at 5 p.m. tuned into nation TV. When it came on I was blown away. In my mind the first episode I ever
watched was my favourite, it was called the two cathedrals, and since I don’t
think it makes sense to offer spoiler alerts for things that were shown in 2001
(10 years should be the expiry date, except I still get pissed off when I read
the essays in front of Tolstoy’s books and get this lengthy exposition about
what to watch out for and the trainy endings of Anna Karenina so…) SPOILER.

In that episode the president’s secretary dies in a car
crash, she had just bought her first new car and on her virgin ride she gets
hit by a drunk driver. There’s a lot of emotion swirling around at this time,
the president had concealed the fact of a disease that he had. His re-election is in the toilet because the truth always comes out and bites you in the ass
in the worst way. His wife is angry that he still wants to be president again despite promises made and paid for but power is the most seductive siren that ever sang. A storm is brewing
on one of the coasts and it reminds the old man of another tragedy. He is
angry, he is angry at God and after the service he asks for some time to talk
to his creator (he is a deeply religious man.) he stands there and looks up at
God and lets his anger flow. “You can’t conceive neither can I the appalling
strangeness of the mercy of God said Graham Greene, I don’t know whose ass he
was kissing there because I think you’re just vindictive.” He says in a speech
laden with examples of acts of God, like in the Brothers Karamazov when after listing the cruelties of the world one brother says to the other "it's not God that i don't accept Alyosha only i must respectfully return him the ticket" he talks in Latin and English, he expresses
his anger in a way that I have never heard spoken to a deity before. We weren’t
allowed to be angry at God you see. After I watched and found myself in my-angry-at-God periods I wanted to
write a character like this, I had things I wanted to say to God in ways that I
couldn’t without calling blasphemy and lightning down on my head and I wanted
to say them, or write about someone who could, hide behind the cloak of
artistic license and this is what good writing does, it inspires you. A writer
is a reader moved to emulation said Saul Bellow and that scene moved me to
emulation. I’ll just paste it below after doing what I hate all those Tolstoy
prefacers for doing.

After watching the West Wing I loved Aaron sorkin’s writing
he’s probably my favourite screenwriter, there’s nothing he would do that I
wouldn’t watch twice. Then I read that he was going to do a movie about Facebook,
the social network and I began to read about it. I read the New Yorker profile
that talked about Mark Zuckerberg’s reaction to the movie and his portrayal in
it. The writer had said he would be more faithful to a good story than he would
be to the truth, so I watched it as entertainment. But in the profile they
interview Aaron Sorkin, they tell him that Mark Zuckerberg had listed the west
wing as one of his favourite series and that Mark’s favourite episode was the
same as mine(not in those words exactly.) but after the movie he had taken it
down, "I wish you hadn't told me that" responded Aaron Sorkin.

i don't even need your love

Well Facebook, I can’t keep up with it. The timeline came
out and I didn’t want to move but I knew I would and I knew that with time I
would like it more than anything that came before, I knew that their innovation
knows user friendliness more than my human inertia can. So I moved. When they
mixed chat with messages and made all the threads into a long spool of sooner
forgotten, half tipsy flirtations I was angry but now it’s what life is. Still
I find new things about Facebook all the time.

A few years ago I had no idea how to remove a friend, I just let people wallow into obscurity till their posts no
longer come up and it works for me. And I never felt that anyone would treat me
different but I was removed as a friend. It happened a lot. It keeps happening
and I can never know when it did or does exactly since those are people whose profiles
aren’t touched on enough for me to notice that they don’t want me to. And it’s
always my friend’s exes. I don’t get it. Am always so nice to these girls, I
get to know them and find a place where conversation is easy, I try to turn
them into wing women and give them alone time with their boyfriends, I keep a
professional distance but soon think of them as acquaintances then they break
up and they remove the whole cancer. They poison themselves with the treatment
of burned bridges but maybe its what they need to heal.

Once I was removed as a friend, personally. I couldn’t
believe it, I thought it was a glitch,
she wasn’t the girlfriend of any of my friends and while things weren’t a rose
bed they also weren’t a rose bed since they weren’t that thorny or muddy . It’s like
only I can’t see the stains of red and mud that relationships leave behind.

Then recently Facebook sent me another lesson in usability.
I had come home tired and tried, it was 5 in the morning and since we are in
that kind of season the sun had already stretched its fingers over the horizon
grasping the earth in tendrils of light and making the sky that azure blue it
becomes at dawn. I got home and turned on my computer, I had a girl on my mind
and I wanted to write her a message, I had been putting it off since… I don’t
know why. I know she meant something and the worst thing is that maybe I made
her feel like she didn’t and the end was sad, it was mournful and mourned. But
distance gave us some time and we were going to find a way to be friends. This
can’t happen with everyone we should realise, sometimes even
when it’s no one’s fault the smiles stretched taut still break our
skin from the falseness and eggshells carpets. But it was time to write the message and I put on
my internet, I go on my Facebook, search the name and get nothing, search my
messages and try to write then I see this

I never knew that was even possible, unable to send
messages, and Facebook asks me to click on something to learn more. So I click
on it, I want to learn more. A stupid part of me seems to think that there will
be an explanation posted there, a “dear….. I don’t want to get messages from
you any more since I can’t…” but that’s never going to be what you get. When you
go into surgery you need warmth and love, you need your family and words of
encouragement, instead you get a cold slice of steel, it cuts through your skin
and blood gets pumped out and sucked, it’s ugly and professional. It’s
technical and that’s what I get a technical message “if you would also like to
do this to someone we can show you how…”

Sometimes am completely vulnerable and so easily bruised.
Maybe I had done something that deserved such a complete shutout and I looked through
he messages seeing eggshells cracked everywhere, seeing explanations that still
make me yearn for the time they weren’t needed and so much hostility that I
can’t believe I never saw it before. I get more heartache than I do headaches
and as this happened it touched me. Anger was unavailable. I didn’t know when
this happened, a year, a few months? The closer messages spoke of
reconciliation in a tone of wistfulness. We may want it to happen but the world
doesn’t give people that many chances and we blew that one out of the water.
There’s no timeline for broken friendships and like stars we can keep seeing
their light long, long after their heat has died and soon we realise how cold
the night really is. But still I ached.

Monday, May 7, 2012

I should probably research the
provenance of Labour Day, it probably lies in Karl Marx and his theories of a
just society and proper economy. Things that broke down in practice, but
everything breaks down in practice. I remember reading once that communism is
the equal sharing of misery and capitalism would then be the equal sharing of
opportunity but it’s not really. So every labour day we
celebrate the worker. On a day that’s named for what most workers really are
the labourers, the ones who push and push for hours in a dark, deserted ward.
Surrounded by doctors and an expectant family outside but in truth alone in
a sea of pain and hope. The worst thing about this labour is that it’s usually
for someone else. A child put up for adoption without consent. So every Labour
Day governments around the world raise the minimum wage, the minimum taxable
wage actually.

This labour day I was woken up by
a phone call a friend asking if we wanted to go on a boat. The answer is always yes to
this question. The sun was shining and the sea that had previously looked so
foreboding angry with a dark shade of grey was now blue with possibility. We
met her at the pier and got on the boat.

“Do you want to go fast?”

“Always.”

not the actual boat just a pic from the internet, but how it felt

And off we set. Boats are amazing
things, riding them is an amazing thing. It’s not a passive experience to be on
a boat, if you go fast it’s an active process. There are speed bumps
everywhere, wavelet after wavelet crashing into the brow. The speeds we were
going at meant that every time this happened we would have a little jump, then
another, then another. And it’s not like being on a road. On a road the jumps
aren’t smooth, and they are too far away from each other to develop any sense
of rhythm. If you drive too fast you risk ruining the chassis of your car, or
its undercarriage or carburettor or whatever’s under there. On a boat you let
loose. You go faster as you come to a wave, you crest it with pride and soon
you become part of the motion of the ocean. You learn to let yourself go as the
boat goes up and fly with it, then come sailing back down to your seat so that it doesn’t hurt too much. Then the boat starts talking to you and you know when to do this.
When I rode a horse for the first time the instructor told me, “just relax it’s
like riding a woman.” Well about a boat, it’s like riding a horse, you let
yourself go and listen to its needs and soon you can respond instinctively, you
don’t have to think or do after some time just be.

But there’s the spray. The
temperature was maybe 18 degrees but the sea did not know this; instead we got
a constant spray of ice-cold water. It splashed in my face till I had a
headache and I was shivering and chattering from it. It splashed all over my
trousers and I had a wet stain in the place you don’t want to have a wet stain
because people will look at you as you go home and think you either have very
bad bladder control or had a very good lap dance, neither of which are very
endearing. I looked back at my friend at the helm of the boat. It was the kind
of boat where the captain stands and has her hair pulled out rolling a
strawberry blond carpet all over the air. The splash didn’t bother her and the
hair just made a better picture. There was something refreshing about this
vision it was as though the world was hers and just as we bowed in submission
to the sea I did too to this. My mind told me that I had to get
married to a woman who could ride a boat, and then I said the next thing that
followed that thought.

“Oh you make me so wet.”

The cold reality of the present
winning out over the ideal fiction of the moment yet again

When you ride slowly it’s an
immersive experience. At sea everything succumbs to the seduction of the water.
Everything bows down and quiets out. A bird caw is the only call you can hear somewhere far out
in the distance. There is no splashing of the water on the waves,just the water
and it looks solid. It looks like the ground except its moving and shifting,
probably the only thing that Jesus and pins have in common is that neither of
them break the surface tension. Right then I felt like I could do it too. Like
if I just listened enough to the sound and caught the waves at the right crest,
if I just let me follow them down it would be ok and i could walk off into the mist.

We came to the boat house soon
enough and her father asked me that most famous of questions

“Do you like Norway?”

“Sometimes, on days like today
with the sun out like this it’s nearly perfect.”

We got back to town around 2 pm
and I couldn’t see myself going home luckily everyone agreed and we decided to
rendezvous at the beach. (Various purchases tore apart our group.) Later I went
to the beach. Now in truth this is not a beach, it’s a tiny little
replica. Its 200 metres long and maybe 80 wide. But it has sand and a volleyball
tent and there are people here when the sun shows its beautiful rays. All my
housemates had ditched and I didn’t feel like giving up a beach day or a few
kroner of credit to call them up so I took off my shoes and walked on it. It feels
good to have sand between your toes. The grains caress them ever so lovingly,
thousands and thousands with every step. Maybe that’s why it feels so good. As
you walk on a beach your titan likestep encompasses all
these little globes. Then I sat down and sun basked.

It’s not till you leave Kenya for
a while that you understand it. It’s not till then that you realise why every
tourist takes themselves to coast and even visiting relatives break off a
little of the short time they have to visit Mombasa before they have to come
back to cold, cold Europe. When you don’t see her for a while the sun is the
best girl you ever knew. She’s warm and welcoming, she makes you feel good
without even trying, she fills you with energy, the light of your life and all
you want is to close your eyes as she kisses you. Because when she kisses you
it all goes red. And I sat like that for a while with my eyes closed and my
skin to the sun.

Then I continued walking. Stopping
to say hallo to these girls who were also enjoying the day out. I had decided
that the flashes of daredevilry need to be more common and that a hallo is such a small
thing to lose for all the possibility that comes behind it.

“Please sit down” one of them
said.

When the sun began to leave I
decided to too. It’s always better to walk away anyway. On the way I had the
patter patter of a basketball. And saw a group of people I know. The thing about
living in a small town is you meet the same people over and over again. The streets
are not crowded enough that anonymity is given. There is no cloak of
invisibility just a coat of familiarity after a while. And when you know
someone for some reason you begin to really see them. If I haven’t talked to
someone i can pass by them in the street 100s of times and still not see them but
conversation and shared experience has this bond it creates. Your mind now
begins to look for the familiar and find it. Patterns are established ad the
pattern of a small town is easy enough to predict, expect to see everyone. My
housemate was there too having chosen the game over the beach but I couldn’t
blame him basketball can be a beautiful game.

It took no time to convince me to
play. We formed a team and began the game. It took very little time for the
feel of the ball to come back to me. Soon I was passing and stealing and missing
baskets just like the old days. Sports when played properly is almost like a
dance. A properly gelled team is a symphony of talent and harmony. The sounds
people make are irrelevant instead there are things like hand gestures and
false starts. There is instinct and forgiveness given to those who dare. The
ball can be whipped around going this way and that and back again, the whole
time the people playing are moving, looking for an advantage, a little extra
space, a spare moment. The other guys are moving too, pressing in and inching
closer. The ball finds hands and the backs of baskets, there are moments of silence.
Moments where the only thing interrupting the patter patter of the ball is the
breath of the players, released in a measured manner and the sound of their
footsteps and soon the hand gestures are replaced by looks and telling glances.
Instinct seems to take over and when you watch a team playing well against
another team it’s not all those people it’s just two entities locked in a dance
to the win. This game was not nearly at this level. At moments we approached it
but my lack of fitness caught up with me much faster than my lost talent could, we won a few and lost one but it felt great to play sports again.

Getting home at nine and the
beginning of twilight was still in its infancy.

Thursday, May 3, 2012

The other day I walked to the river or I tried to. I live in
a really small town, well the centre is small but it’s the kind of town that
outlies and lies about its size. In Kenya a place this size would hold maybe 5
times the number of people this holds but the residential areas are
spread all over the map. The centre is tiny though and its geometrical, it’s a square
with lines cutting in through the middle and it’s easy to get around but I still
get lost. My directional compass has been messed up so by the magnetism of my
curiosity that i always walk down routes I have never taken before thinking I can find my way there but I never can and I never learn.

I wanted to end up on the bridge but I found myself under it
and I thought good enough. There was this guy there fishing. He had set himself
up professionally, his beers were close by and his cigarettes near his light,
his light in his pocket and his determination in the water. He took the fishing
line and whipped it back once, not too far, not too hard then he let it go. The
line sailed into the water and dangled impotently over the edge before a fish
began to nibble on it and it responded to this stimulus for which it was made immediately stiffening up. He rolled back the line and put the fish on the
shore. He stopped for a couple of puffs and sips, a small victory and celebration. Then he
began again. I thought he would send it the same distance but instead now he whipped it back and sent it flying and
fly it did. I tried to keep up with its trajectory as it flew arrow straight into
the air becoming a silver particle then began its downward trajectory. I tried
to see where it would land but I couldn’t. It took him a while to bring it
back.

This episode put me in mind of J. Cole. He’s a rapper, new
but good, there’s a lot of intelligence in the lines I hear from him, things I hadn’t
thought of before or hadn’t thought of in that way isn’t it ironic?/ when I hit someone else you the one that bruise he
says in one song. Same song(maybe not i listen to a lot music while i cook now and it all gets blurred together one album being a really long song set to different beats) there’s the line that the whipping motion brought
to mind isn’t it ironic? /now whips are
the ones that set us free. This doesn’t
really need exposition but sometimes things get more than what they need and
who knows maybe there still is someone who doesn’t know that whips is slang for
cars. Life is irony a lot of the times.

I remember in Egypt chilling with some other interns
and smoking shisha that I had to decide had an effect. So invoked the placebo, I
was called on this and I said “life is a placebo effect.” Maybe it’s not though maybe it’s an ironic existence that we
all slog through and just smile at. More money more problems said a wise man
once, and someone else said that money won’t solve all our problems but at least it will
solve our money problems. Sometimes thought it seems like money is its own
curse and prison. A sea of green that we can’t see out of, most money in the
world isn’t green granted but the tendency to think in dollars is something
that the overwhelming cultural exports of America leave us in. The more money
you have the more you need. The less free you are to go out in whatever you
want, to wherever you want with whoever you want. And the longer you spend awake counting, recounting and trying to account for it. Even those born to privilege for whom money is a plaything seem so wrapped up in escaping their reality that they turn to a different addiction, drugs, sex, fame power. Money defines so much more
than the wear and tear of your wallet. It means you can’t just go on holiday
somewhere and live anonymously, living cheaply is one way to see the more
interesting places we have in the world the only way to be really free but nothing is free and poverty is just another prison one with worse food. And the absolute worst thing about
money is that quote from Rockefeller, how much is enough? The rich man was
asked and he gave the most honest answer that question ever got. “One more
dollar.”

Last week I got a compliment about my writing from someone
whose writing I really like, and even though it was a compliment it was still
couched in apology. This is probably since the truth about compliments is that
they are also comparisons. You look good today can also mean you didn’t
yesterday. Something meant to make us feel good can make us feel otherwise. So how
do you combat this, how do you make someone feel like they look good every day?
Well tell them every day. But a thing oft repeated is soon neglected. Compliments
need to be special in order for them to have that effect that they should. They
should move us, especially a heartfelt compliment and the first time you hear a
heartfelt compliment it does. You feel this glow inside of you and you become
happier, that’s why I love to tell girls how beautiful their smile is, and
when I mean this I reward everyone. I get to see the smile again too. So it seems compliment need to be comparisons otherwise they ring hollow but say
them too much and they don’t ring at all.

There’s a lady from the orient I meet a lot on the way to
work, not really meet just see. She has a stern face, it seems lined with worry
or discipline more like. The wrinkles didn’t settle where they wanted she willed
them into place, an inscrutable face mask of determination. As she walks she
smokes and she smokes like I have never seen anyone do it before. Every time I see her there is a cigarette in her hand and a cigarette in her mouth. The great thing
about this is that they are all the same cigarette. She puts it in her mouth
and takes a puff, a quick puff just a pull, and then she pulls it away. Not too
far though, the angle between her elbow is barely 30 degrees before the fist is
snapped back, the time is enough for one breath and she lets that go and meets
the cigarette again on inhalation. Then again, then again, then again. Over and
over and over. They say a cigarette takes away 7 minutes of your life, but what beyond
all doubt of studies takes away 7 minutes of your life is 7 minutes of living.

Someone else I meet all the time, well not so much now. In the
deep of winter I saw him all the time. When snow invaded my boots and ice
crunched under them with every step I took. It was a cold time in Kristiansand,
a dark time and one day as we walk home in front of us is this Arab. He’s short
and has a face that seems ready to smile at any provocation. All he has on his
head is a tiny hat. He risks it and says to us “a salaam aleikum.” The Swahili part
of my head kicks into gear immediately and it brings about the response “aleikum
salaam.” He’s so happy he stops to talk to us (I was with my housemate.) the
Africa cup of nations or its qualifiers was going on (football passes me by
without a whiff of interest, it’s like a drug dog with a cold.) and he begins
to ask which team we support. Supporting Kenya is hard for football fans. It’s a
difficult thing, its emotional battering time and time again. Kenya will lose. It’s
all they seem to do. All the matches I go to watch or hear about are losses. We
win some but we are a woefully bad team in. We support them out of
patriotic fervour a pathetic fever that a thousand losses can’t cure. But we don’t make
it to the Africa cup of nations, we never do and so I support Egypt. It’s nice
to back someone who has a chance of winning. There are only ever two players in
my book. The underdog and the one destined to take it. The guy with the perfect record or the
guy with the perfect story. Kenya is definitely the underdog but the perfect
story needs time to develop. More time than we can ever seem to give it, so I support
Egypt.

Communication grinds to a halt after that. My Arabic is so rudimentary
its non-existent right now and his English is if anything worse than my Arabic
so communication stops flowing. And in the end of isn’t it ironic that I had
no observation to tie to this third meeting of mine? Well at least as ironic as
rain on your wedding day.